In April, the Kraft Group—which owns the New England Patriots, MLS’ New England Revolution and Gillette Stadium—signed a five-year agreement with tech infrastructure provider NWN to transform the tech framework for the Kraft Group’s facilities, including Gillette Stadium and a new training facility for the Patriots. I talked to Kraft Group CIO Michael Israel and NWN CEO Jim Sullivan in April about the challenges of bringing the latest technology infrastructure to a place like Gillette Stadium, and how big facilities with a multitude of uses can plan for the future.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CIO newsletter.

Why is it important to partner with NWN to bring upgrades to Gillette Stadium and the Kraft Group’s other event facilities?

Israel: With NWN as a partner, everything we do within the Kraft organization from an IT perspective is on a life cycle: When we buy something, this is how long we expect to use it. It’s become a necessary component within IT because you want to have a predictive budget. It’s no longer ‘set it and forget it.’ You have to know that I’m going to keep this Wi-Fi system for five years. That way, you can at least let management know that while we’re spending this amount of money now, it’s going to come back up four or five years later. Creating that expectation, long-term budget and continued investment in it avoids the surprise.

That being said, we have been looking at what the next five years brings to the Kraft organization, and in partnership with NWN, we have a whole bunch of things that are lining up together. That, plus new facilities, really made us sit back and say, ‘We need to be looking at this beyond the typical 18 to 24 months of what we do for budgeting.’

We have a new football practice facility that’s being built as we speak, which comes live in April of ‘26, which brings about its own components for networking. We then have the FIFA World Cup coming in June and July of ‘26. Coming out of that, we have new network and Wi-Fi refreshes. We’ll have to make determinations of [the best Wi-Fi speed and capacity]. By the time we’re done with all that, we have another firewall refresh that comes forward. And then in the midst of all that, if that’s not enough, we’re potentially building another stadium north of Boston, in Everett, Massachusetts, for our soccer team.

Kraft Group CIO Michael Israel and NWN CEO Jim Sullivan

All of this together from a core infrastructure perspective, we sat with Jim [Sullivan] and [CMO] Andrew [Gilman] and their team and said: This is everything we have on our docket for five years. I need an organization that can help us strategically plan, make decisions based on what's the right choice for all of this. We’re making a commitment now that’s going to go five to seven years into the future, and I need that platform in place because what we’re doing functionally is rapidly changing at the same time.

There’s base items that are happening, like as we build our football practice facility and you go into a room, I can control the light, or the temperature or the ambient settings in conference rooms from our Cisco platforms. But if I enter the room, what’s going to happen on our IP TV systems? How are we [working with] the endpoints that are hanging off of the network, to create a better experience for the players that are coming in? As you bring AI into the mix, you’re talking about things that are entirely different and looking and saying, ‘How can I take data that’s historically sitting there and use it to my advantage?’

We’re looking at the stadium itself. If you’re a ticket holder and you’re walking up to the gate, what’s the last thing you want to do? Wait in line for 20 minutes to get into the stadium, wait in line for 20 minutes to get a cheeseburger. One of the projects we’re currently investigating is building a digital wallet system, where I walk up and, similar to a Clear lane at an airport, we can do opt-in facial........

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